The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.

ICREACH has been accessible to more than 1,000 analysts at 23 U.S. government agencies that perform intelligence work, according to a 2010 memo. A planning document from 2007 lists the DEA, FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency as core members. Information shared through ICREACH can be used to track people’s movements, map out their networks of associates, help predict future actions, and potentially reveal religious affiliations or political beliefs.

The creation of ICREACH represented a landmark moment in the history of classified U.S. government surveillance, according to the NSA documents.

“The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community,” noted a top-secret memo dated December 2007. “This team began over two years ago with a basic concept compelled by the IC’s increasing need for communications metadata and NSA’s ability to collect, process and store vast amounts of communications metadata related to worldwide intelligence targets.”

The search tool was designed to be the largest system for internally sharing secret surveillance records in the United States, capable of handling two to five billion new records every day, including more than 30 different kinds of metadata on emails, phone calls, faxes, internet chats, and text messages, as well as location information collected from cellphones. Metadata reveals information about a communication—such as the “to” and “from” parts of an email, and the time and date it was sent, or the phone numbers someone called and when they called—but not the content of the message or audio of the call.

ICREACH does not appear to have a direct relationship to the large NSA database, previously reported by The Guardian, that stores information on millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Unlike the 215 database, which is accessible to a small number of NSA employees and can be searched only in terrorism-related investigations, ICREACH grants access to a vast pool of data that can be mined by analysts from across the intelligence community for “foreign intelligence”—a vague term that is far broader than counterterrorism.

Data available through ICREACH appears to be primarily derived from surveillance of foreigners’ communications, and planning documents show that it draws on a variety of different sources of data maintained by the NSA. Though one 2010 internal paper clearly calls it “the ICREACH database,” a U.S. official familiar with the system disputed that, telling The Intercept that while “it enables the sharing of certain foreign intelligence metadata,” ICREACH is “not a repository [and] does not store events or records.” Instead, it appears to provide analysts with the ability to perform a one-stop search of information from a wide variety of separate databases.

In a statement to The Intercept, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that the system shares data that is swept up by programs authorized under Executive Order 12333, a controversial Reagan-era presidential directive that underpins several NSA bulk surveillance operations that monitor communications overseas. The 12333 surveillance takes place with no court oversight and has received minimal Congressional scrutiny because it is targeted at foreign, not domestic, communication networks. But the broad scale of 12333 surveillance means that some Americans’ communications get caught in the dragnet as they transit international cables or satellites—and documents contained in the Snowden archive indicate that ICREACH taps into some of that data.

Legal experts told The Intercept they were shocked to learn about the scale of the ICREACH system and are concerned that law enforcement authorities might use it for domestic investigations that are not related to terrorism.

“To me, this is extremely troublesome,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “The myth that metadata is just a bunch of numbers and is not as revealing as actual communications content was exploded long ago—this is a trove of incredibly sensitive information.”

Brian Owsley, a federal magistrate judge between 2005 and 2013, said he was alarmed that traditional law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the DEA were among those with access to the NSA’s surveillance troves.

“This is not something that I think the government should be doing,” said Owsley, an assistant professor of law at Indiana Tech Law School. “Perhaps if information is useful in a specific case, they can get judicial authority to provide it to another agency. But there shouldn’t be this buddy-buddy system back-and-forth.”

Jeffrey Anchukaitis, an ODNI spokesman, declined to comment on a series of questions from The Intercept about the size and scope of ICREACH, but said that sharing information had become “a pillar of the post-9/11 intelligence community” as part of an effort to prevent valuable intelligence from being “stove-piped in any single office or agency.”

Using ICREACH to query the surveillance data, “analysts can develop vital intelligence leads without requiring access to raw intelligence collected by other IC [Intelligence Community] agencies,” Anchukaitis said. “In the case of NSA, access to raw signals intelligence is strictly limited to those with the training and authority to handle it appropriately. The highest priority of the intelligence community is to work within the constraints of law to collect, analyze and understand information related to potential threats to our national security.”

One-Stop Shopping

The mastermind behind ICREACH was recently retired NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander, who outlined his vision for the system in a classified 2006 letter to the then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. The search tool, Alexander wrote, would “allow unprecedented volumes of communications metadata to be shared and analyzed,” opening up a “vast, rich source of information” for other agencies to exploit. By late 2007 the NSA reported to its employees that the system had gone live as a pilot program.

The NSA described ICREACH as a “one-stop shopping tool” for analyzing communications. The system would enable at least a 12-fold increase in the volume of metadata being shared between intelligence community agencies, the documents stated. Using ICREACH, the NSA planned to boost the amount of communications “events” it shared with other U.S. government agencies from 50 billion to more than 850 billion, bolstering an older top-secret data sharing system named CRISSCROSS/PROTON, which was launched in the 1990s and managed by the CIA.

To allow government agents to sift through the masses of records on ICREACH, engineers designed a simple “Google-like” search interface. This enabled analysts to run searches against particular “selectors” associated with a person of interest—such as an email address or phone number—and receive a page of results displaying, for instance, a list of phone calls made and received by a suspect over a month-long period. The documents suggest these results can be used reveal the “social network” of the person of interest—in other words, those that they communicate with, such as friends, family, and other associates.

The purpose of ICREACH, projected initially to cost between $2.5 million and $4.5 million per year, was to allow government agents to comb through the NSA’s metadata troves to identify new leads for investigations, to predict potential future threats against the U.S., and to keep tabs on what the NSA calls “worldwide intelligence targets.”

However, the documents make clear that it is not only data about foreigners’ communications that are available on the system. Alexander’s memo states that “many millions of…minimized communications metadata records” would be available through ICREACH, a reference to the process of “minimization,” whereby identifying information—such as part of a phone number or email address—is removed so it is not visible to the analyst. NSA documents define minimization as “specific procedures to minimize the acquisition and retention [of] information concerning unconsenting U.S. persons”—making it a near certainty that ICREACH gives analysts access to millions of records about Americans. The “minimized” information can still be retained under NSA rules for up to five years and “unmasked” at any point during that period if it is ever deemed necessary for an investigation.

The Brennan Center’s Goitein said it appeared that with ICREACH, the government “drove a truck” through loopholes that allowed it to circumvent restrictions on retaining data about Americans. This raises a variety of legal and constitutional issues, according to Goitein, particularly if the data can be easily searched on a large scale by agencies like the FBI and DEA for their domestic investigations.

“The idea with minimization is that the government is basically supposed to pretend this information doesn’t exist, unless it falls under certain narrow categories,” Goitein said. “But functionally speaking, what we’re seeing here is that minimization means, ‘we’ll hold on to the data as long as we want to, and if we see anything that interests us then we can use it.'”

A key question, according to several experts consulted by The Intercept, is whether the FBI, DEA or other domestic agencies have used their access to ICREACH to secretly trigger investigations of Americans through a controversial process known as “parallel construction.”

Parallel construction involves law enforcement agents using information gleaned from covert surveillance, but later covering up their use of that data by creating a new evidence trail that excludes it. This hides the true origin of the investigation from defense lawyers and, on occasion, prosecutors and judges—which means the legality of the evidence that triggered the investigation cannot be challenged in court.

In practice, this could mean that a DEA agent identifies an individual he believes is involved in drug trafficking in the United States on the basis of information stored on ICREACH. The agent begins an investigation but pretends, in his records of the investigation, that the original tip did not come from the secret trove. Last year, Reuters first reported details of parallel construction based on NSA data, linking the practice to a unit known as the Special Operations Division, which Reuters said distributes tips from NSA intercepts and a DEA database known as DICE.

Tampa attorney James Felman, chair of the American Bar Association’s criminal justice section, told The Intercept that parallel construction is a “tremendously problematic” tactic because law enforcement agencies “must be honest with courts about where they are getting their information.” The ICREACH revelations, he said, “raise the question of whether parallel construction is present in more cases than we had thought. And if that’s true, it is deeply disturbing and disappointing.”

Anchukaitis, the ODNI spokesman, declined to say whether ICREACH has been used to aid domestic investigations, and he would not name all of the agencies with access to the data. “Access to information-sharing tools is restricted to users conducting foreign intelligence analysis who have the appropriate training to handle the data,” he said.

Project CRISSCROSS

The roots of ICREACH can be traced back more than two decades.

In the early 1990s, the CIA and the DEA embarked on a secret initiative called Project CRISSCROSS. The agencies built a database system to analyze phone billing records and phone directories, in order to identify links between intelligence targets and other persons of interest. At first, CRISSCROSS was used in Latin America and was “extremely successful” at identifying narcotics-related suspects. It stored only five kinds of metadata on phone calls: date, time, duration, called number, and calling number, according to an NSA memo.

The program rapidly grew in size and scope. By 1999, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the FBI had gained access to CRISSCROSS and were contributing information to it. As CRISSCROSS continued to expand, it was supplemented with a system called PROTON that enabled analysts to store and examine additional types of data. These included unique codes used to identify individual cellphones, location data, text messages, passport and flight records, visa application information, as well as excerpts culled from CIA intelligence reports.

An NSA memo noted that PROTON could identify people based on whether they behaved in a “similar manner to a specific target.” The memo also said the system “identifies correspondents in common with two or more targets, identifies potential new phone numbers when a target switches phones, and identifies networks of organizations based on communications within the group.” In July 2006, the NSA estimated that it was storing 149 billion phone records on PROTON.

According to the NSA documents, PROTON was used to track down “High Value Individuals” in the United States and Iraq, investigate front companies, and discover information about foreign government operatives. CRISSCROSS enabled major narcotics arrests and was integral to the CIA’s rendition program during the Bush Administration, which involved abducting terror suspects and flying them to secret “black site” prisons where they were brutally interrogated and sometimes tortured. One NSA document on the system, dated from July 2005, noted that the use of communications metadata “has been a contribution to virtually every successful rendition of suspects and often, the deciding factor.”

However, the NSA came to view CRISSCROSS/PROTON as insufficient, in part due to the aging standard of its technology. The intelligence community was sensitive to criticism that it had failed to share information that could potentially have helped prevent the 9/11 attacks, and it had been strongly criticized for intelligence failures before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. For the NSA, it was time to build a new and more advanced system to radically increase metadata sharing.

A New Standard

In 2006, NSA director Alexander drafted his secret proposal to then-Director of National Intelligence Negroponte.

Alexander laid out his vision for what he described as a “communications metadata coalition” that would be led by the NSA. His idea was to build a sophisticated new tool that would grant other federal agencies access to “more than 50 existing NSA/CSS metadata fields contained in trillions of records” and handle “many millions” of new minimized records every day—indicating that a large number of Americans’ communications would be included.

The NSA’s contributions to the ICREACH system, Alexander wrote, “would dwarf the volume of NSA’s present contributions to PROTON, as well as the input of all other [intelligence community] contributors.”

Alexander explained in the memo that NSA was already collecting “vast amounts of communications metadata” and was preparing to share some of it on a system called GLOBALREACH with its counterparts in the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance: the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

ICREACH, he proposed, could be designed like GLOBALREACH and accessible only to U.S. agencies in the intelligence community, or IC.

A top-secret PowerPoint presentation from May 2007 illustrated how ICREACH would work—revealing its “Google-like” search interface and showing how the NSA planned to link it to the DEA, DIA, CIA, and the FBI. Each agency would access and input data through a secret data “broker”—a sort of digital letterbox—linked to the central NSA system. ICREACH, according to the presentation, would also receive metadata from the Five Eyes allies.

The aim was not necessarily for ICREACH to completely replace CRISSCROSS/PROTON, but rather to complement it. The NSA planned to use the new system to perform more advanced kinds of surveillance—such as “pattern of life analysis,” which involves monitoring who individuals communicate with and the places they visit over a period of several months, in order to observe their habits and predict future behavior.

The NSA agreed to train other U.S. government agencies to use ICREACH. Intelligence analysts could be “certified” for access to the massive database if they required access in support of a given mission, worked as an analyst within the U.S. intelligence community, and had top-secret security clearance. (According to the latest government figures, there are more than 1.2 million government employees and contractors with top-secret clearance.)

In November 2006, according to the documents, the Director of National Intelligence approved the proposal. ICREACH was rolled out as a test program by late 2007. It’s not clear when it became fully operational, but a September 2010 NSA memo referred to it as the primary tool for sharing data in the intelligence community. “ICREACH has been identified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as the U.S. Intelligence Community’s standard architecture for sharing communications metadata,” the memo states, adding that it provides “telephony metadata events” from the NSA and its Five Eyes partners “to over 1000 analysts across 23 U.S. Intelligence Community agencies.” It does not name all of the 23 agencies, however.

The limitations placed on analysts authorized to sift through the vast data troves are not outlined in the Snowden files, with only scant references to oversight mechanisms. According to the documents, searches performed by analysts are subject to auditing by the agencies for which they work. The documents also say the NSA would conduct random audits of the system to check for any government agents abusing their access to the data. The Intercept asked the NSA and the ODNI whether any analysts had been found to have conducted improper searches, but the agencies declined to comment.

While the NSA initially estimated making upwards of 850 billion records available on ICREACH, the documents indicate that target could have been surpassed, and that the number of personnel accessing the system may have increased since the 2010 reference to more than 1,000 analysts. The intelligence community’s top-secret “Black Budget” for 2013, also obtained by Snowden, shows that the NSA recently sought new funding to upgrade ICREACH to “provide IC analysts with access to a wider set of shareable data.”

In December last year, a surveillance review group appointed by President Obama recommended that as a general rule “the government should not be permitted to collect and store all mass, undigested, non-public personal information about individuals to enable future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes.” It also recommended that any information about United States persons should be “purged upon detection unless it either has foreign intelligence value or is necessary to prevent serious harm to others.”

Peter Swire, one of the five members of the review panel, told The Intercept he could not comment on whether the group was briefed on specific programs such as ICREACH, but noted that the review group raised concerns that “the need to share had gone too far among multiple agencies.”

The growth of ISIS has not been sudden. It has grown over a period of time during which all the NSA tools were practically unknown to all the Terrorists, or so we were led to believe, which would have led them to be pretty careless about their communication.

So who is going to answer for the fact that NSA and the rest of the spooks were were sleeping on duty? How come they did not track the growth of ISIS or follow their money trail all these years? If they did, then the question arises why they did not advise Obama when he went public about a red line concerning a head-of-government trying to fight the same ISIS? These are questions that NSA has conveniently not raised, because the finger of inaction would point to them.

Again, do they have any clue as to who may be funding the ISIS? Who is recruiting them in UK, USA and god alone knows which other countries? Given their Sunni ties, is it probable that our Great Friends the Saudis are funding them?

If this tool is designed to fight ISIS then I am all for it. If this tool finds my dear friend Gen. Keith Alexander sleeping during his watch then he must be hauled up and held to account. Clap, clap … oh! darn I forgot to add James.

While I appreciate the information Snowden has laid out I still can’t help but question it and who is really behind it. Given snowden’s resume it makes absolutely no sense for the NSA to pick him up and give him so much access. Something isn’t right about all this. It looks more like a desensitizing op to me. Or agency vs agency op.

Our world may stopped living the way we know it does tomorrow or in the 12 coming months.
This is why some governments are constantly breaking the law and trying to take clear intelligence advance over ennemies.
The only way is spying on targets, retrieving their actions, knowledge & weapons and put them down.
All major developped countries are into cyberwar since years. You just don’t know it,
And medias won’t tell you much about what they don’t know.
If you understand the word WAR then you’re starting to understand why certain things aren’t respectful, democratical or Disney kind.
If you want your kids to eat some food day after tomorrow then just think: China, Russia, India and many more wants to conquer more markets, put your banks down, your stores, your future.
Gen. Alexander pointed out all this last year.
No one to offer solutions other then critics.
There is no theory but just a war going on, constantly every minute on billions of computers.
This is a new era.
Stand on the good side.

I do not like global warming. But if we wait and discuss it intensely Edward Snowden may be easily able to travel to the former republic of Germany… Now a part of the new empire. Unfortunately they have all these old nuclear power stations. I mean you only look at them and they collapse… What a nightmare! Winter is coming soon this year?

Thanks to the brave efforts of an anonymous group known only as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI a sustained political campaign known as COINTELPRO/Counter Intelligence Program came to light in the 1970s. The FBI’s stated goal was “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” groups that they targeted.

Then and now — ruining the lives of some very good, law-abiding people.

Remember even with this google app human mistakes still rule. The Boston bombers were not picked up by the NSA/CIA/FBI because of a spelling mistake by the FSPB when notifying the Americans. These all powerful systems are vulnerable to human mistakes and misinformation.

I’m shocked that we are spying on other people in the world. This is supposed to be the land of the free, not the land of the NSA. this is out of control, we either stop it now or its over. Encrypted phones, encrypted email, and search engines are the future. I us the non tracking leave me alone search engine http://LookSeek.com a non tracking search engine good for everybody who is making a stance

While Google may have received startup funding from the venture capital arm of the CIA, that doesn’t prove they created the interface for ICReach. The slide says ‘Google-like search’; this suggests a cheap knockoff, otherwise they would have proudly trumpeted ‘Google-designed interface’. If someone shows me their ‘Rolex-like’ watch, I generally assume it is not a real Rolex.

Its not polite to eavesdrop on others, especially when one claims to be so morally just. For today’s law makers, the definitions for (polite) is to be socially correct or proper; and for (morally) is what is right or wrong in human behavior. Thanks for bring this to the voting public.

Anybody remember that dynamic ex-governor of New York Eliot Spitzer. He had Wall Street crying like little children. Suddenly they discovered transactions in his bank account related to a sex worker. Glenn Greenwald should get on the case. There’s a movie here somewhere.

Just get into the habit of either turning off your computer or access point (or ADSL modem). Or, even less hassle, put a shortcut of your Local Area Connection on your Window so that you can just click on it to disable the Local Area Connection. Then when you come back to your computer click on it again to enable Local Area Connection…that way you can leave your modem/access point and computer on while disconnecting the connection between the computer and the modem/access point. It usually only takes just a few seconds to re-establish connection when you come back to your computer.

The document titled “Metadata Policy Conference” and dated 2008 (here, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/metadata-policy-conference) appears to be two discontinuous pages — both lacking any sort of classification marking — from a draft document. Context suggests it is draft meeting minutes relating to the subject conference (which, with the document date, appear only in the title attributed to the document, and not on the face of either of these two pages) bearing comments of another attendee.
These two pages are fascinating and chilling. If you haven’t, go read them now. Send copies to your congressmen.

The Intercept:
Do you have more of this document — content or metadata?
Do you have more of this “conference” — content or metadata?

The spies are using the data base and cell phone location data in particular to commit crimes against those whose politics they find not useful to their aims. For example, they can tamper with a vehicle or a computer if they know the target is in the shower or getting their hair done or watching a major league game at a ball park or…

‘Benevolent dictatorships’ flourish amid internal repression….now, with extra deniable parallel construction. We have seen the best that democracy can yield, and the oligarchs do not like it anymore so they fuck around at the core of our democracy turning it inside out.

Predictive/imposed determinism translates (for the purposes of the NSA) into a regime of political and economic unidimensionality over the entirety of the world and over all the human individuals contained within it; it is a subject that is amply documented in academic sources, and yet there is hardly any mention of it in Wikileaks’ entire archives. On the other hand, predictive analytics/determinism forms the very substance of and the basis for the Snowden revelations; how to explain the yawning discrepancy between the paucity of testimony of predictive/imposed determinism in the Wikileaks archives on the one hand, and its overwhelming corroboration, indeed instantiation, by Snowden’s NSA-centered revelations on the other?

And to think all this is being done under the mystique of the “future” when everything will be crime free and Americans will be living in homes that can be completely controlled from the Internet due to automated appliances, child-proof sensors and other innovations. The myth of the future was constantly used in the propaganda in 1930’s Germany. The more we surrender our lives to the Internet, the more we surrender our lives to forces outside our control. History has proven this. That such a treasure of information should prove to be the bane of our era is sad. That technology has also turned into the ultimate double-edged sword is ironic. Perhaps the lesson is that everything has the potential for good or evil. I am sorry to witness the choices being made.

Predictive/imposed determinism translates (for the purposes of the NSA) into a regime of political and economic unidimensionality over the entirety of the world and over all the human individuals contained within it; it is a subject that is amply documented in academic sources, and yet there is hardly any mention of it in Wikileaks’ entire archives. On the other hand, predictive analytics/determinism forms the very substance of and the basis for the Snowden revelations; how to explain the yawning discrepancy between the paucity of testimony of predictive/imposed determinism in the Wikileaks archives on the one hand, and its overwhelming corroboration, indeed instantiation, by Snowden’s NSA-centered revelations on the other?

Elections have consequences. No Ralph Nader, no victory in Florida for George W. Bush. No victory in Florida, no President George W. Bush. No President Bush, no Justices Alito and Roberts. No Alito and Roberts, no Citizens United and no Hobby Lobby, No President Bush, no NSA/PRISM No ICREACH.

Yes, trot the old “Ralph Nader bad” balloon out and see if it has enough D-helium left to float.

That election was stolen by the supreme court and the dirty tricks the Rs. Al Gore did not fight, he gave up. Lots of Democrats voted for Bush. The ballots were fucked and lots of people unintentionally voted for Buchanan. The Democratic party sucked then and it sucks even more now. Blaming Nader is extremely fucking lazy and inaccurate.

Suggesting that Gore was entitled to votes that went to Nader is as undemocratic as you can get. Gore should have adopted some Nader policies if he wanted Nader’s voters. Really simple, see? Not simplistic.

On Alito and Roberts… any idea how many Democrats let them slip through the conformation hearings? They bear responsibility, Nader does not. It is not Nader’s fault that Democrats are spineless, and part loyalists are blind to the truth.

This is nothing less than a digital “stop and frisk” of every law abiding citizen. Except it also apparently includes being “tagged and bagged” in secret and for as long as “they” decide. Highly invasive and unconstitutional. What can we do to remedy this besides supporting the EFF? Lawmakers appear ineffective in reigning in this beast.

quote” What can we do to remedy this besides supporting the EFF? Lawmakers appear ineffective in reigning in this beast.”unquote
Finally, a voice from the wilderness asks the premier question. WHAT CAN WE DO. I’ll tell you. Gather your family, move to a place on the planet where your children have an opportunity to gaze upon the universe once in their lives before the onslaught of Revelations catches up with them. After all, you are here.

Another naive comment. If you have been paying attention, our intelligence knew all about ISIS, it was the Administration that swept the info under the rug. Everyone is assuming the NSA is spying on all of us, but how do you think they knew about Douglas McCain, who was originally from Chicago, getting killed in Syria? Based on metadata, they honed in on his activities and discovered his intent. Metadata in and of itself doesn’t isolate an individual but once a suspicion arises, it can be used to match back to personal info.

More proof of, a Fascist Dictatorial Militarized Surveillance State, but the military forgets two important points, illegal orders are invalid orders and they do not supersede the Constitution.Hopefully if this goes to trial, it will be a Federal Jury trial

Ferguson MO. is not a black or white issue its about, Facism or Liberty ! Its time to dismantle the Fascist Dictatorial Militarized Surveillance State ! Americans must realize if they can get away with military tactics against black folks they can get away with doing the same to you ! Wrong is wrong & it matters not what your skin color is .

Time for some PAYBACK, wake up America, Democrats or Republicans. liberals or conservatives it’s two sides of the same evil coin it’s called Fascism. So the next time a Democrat or Republican asks for your vote, support or money just say no & vote for an independent candidate.

Send a message they can’t ignore & will understand ! ! Both parties have been complicit in this criminal activity. Some will say they don’t want to waste their vote, but you are already wasting your vote on Democrats & Republicans because they are the ones who have already betrayed us & they have been doing it for decades. This should be a joint effort on the part of all Americans, Democrats,Republicans & Independent voters ! Organize now before its to late ! Your liberty is at stake and that of your children & grandchildren !

REMEMBER: POLITICIANS, BUREAUCRATS AND DIAPERS SHOULD BE CHANGED OFTEN AND FOR THE SAME REASON.

this is disgraceful. The NSA violates the constitution and spies on Americans in the name of national security. I think some Americans are willing to live with that. But now this info is going to be shared with regular law enforcement like FBI or DEA?!! So these agencies get to profit from the NSA violating the Bill of Rights. TERRIBLE!!! This will allow law enforcement to do end-run around the Constitution. Why would they ever need warrants, ever again? Just look up whatever they need in the NSA records.

bunch of invy league nuts – who never could get a date in high school or colliege – nerds on top of nerds – these folks are not the ones we need guarding America or our secrets they are watching or personal life, watching our sex lives nuts poop on them!

Big Brother has been watching since 2007 ?
During the entire Obama presidency?
The hell with it! I’m voting for Vlad Putin for President of the US in 2016.
Might as well have a real spy running things.

Obama’s mother was a translator for the CIA and Obama worked for a CIA front group out of college. Do your homework. He has nothing in common with the life experiences of the vast majority of black men in the U.S. His economics are straight out of the U. of Chicago: 100% Milton Friedman neo-liberalism (an economic term of art that has nothing to do with political liberalism because both major Parties practice it at different speeds).

What always crack me up is that collecting any data on non-US citizens is never seen as a problem (inside US)!
“ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing.”

Sarah, there seems to be problem with the small government mindset in the US too. Take Texas and Missouri as concrete examples. It gets even worse as you drill down to the little Jim Crow fiefdoms littering middle America. Maybe the problem is Americans themselves, not the size of their governments.

“Maybe the problem is Americans themselves, not the size of their governments.”

precisely the sort of thinking that led us into this situation.

I can tell exactly which station your train of thought is pulling into next, and I’m not amused. it really takes a low character to respond to an article about totalitarian government with the suggestion that what we really need is a totalitarian government.

@ItsAWrap, I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not. In either case I want to add that self-inflicted doom is a choice, similar to voting for a Democrat, Republican, or Independent. US voters who are concerned with their country’s well-being do have the choice of unregistering and not voting in 2016. A massive no-show would eliminate the winning hacks’ legitimacy in their own eyes.

Meanwhile, citizens’ time could be better spent gathering in ad-hoc groups to discuss issues, platforms, and candidates of their own for the next rounds. That’s not saying it would be easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy. Beyond consumer apathy and a lack of imagination about what is realistically possible — due to Americans’ famous lack of curiosity about what actually is and has been real — there is the problem of excluding Dem/Rep/Ind politicians and Stasi rodents from digital conversations and face-to-face meetings. Ignoring Hillary Clinton and the Tea Party is the easy part. The extremely hard part is barring the Stasi from participation.

If American voting habits don’t change in a constructive way there is zero chance of dismantling the Stasi State, which should be Agenda Item Nos. 1,2,3 for any American political group interested in the well-being of their so-called democratic nation. If the Business Party is not ditched, there is a zero percent chance that the US’ perpetual offensive war binging will be treated, and reparations paid, and there is no chance the country’s middle class will ever recover from the middle class approved sale of the US’ manufacturing base.

I know I know… fat chance! But it’s worth repeating: self-inflicted doom is a choice, and realistic options are not limited to those defined by the good, loud folks at the Pentagon, GS, and Comcast.

I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but would it not be better to vote for someone you like, than to not vote at all? We already have a really poor turnout for elections and that has not helped. A poorer turnout would indicate even more apathy from the non-voter, not something that would give the assholes pause. Just something that makes the money pouring in even more powerful.

If a million or more people voted for a radical change to the left, might that actually make more of a difference? I think so. They do not care unless they think they will lose at some point. They can lose by having their vote diluted. Maybe then, instead of claiming a Nader-like scapegoat cost somebody an election, they would take responsibility and start acting like a representative government, maybe even take some of the radical’s ideas for the party platform…HAH, what the hell am I thinking?

Anyway, that’s my pathetic little plan. One of the few powers left to us little people is to be less sheep-like. Do not fall for their binary tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum bullshit “choice”. Another small power would be to show them they can’t make us apathetic, we just won’t cooperate with their spin doctors and media whores. They love it when they get a small turnout, it means everything is copacetic in their insulated little bubble-world. Let’s lance that boil, shall we?

Hi John, your kind response and serious question deserves an answer. I don’t particularly like my answer, which echoes much of what you said, but I didn’t have enough time today.

I respect your reasoning, but I don’t think temporarily unregistering is an expression of apathy. I’m suggesting not voting in Nov. 2014 and Nov. 2016, working on finding or cajoling people you think are trustworthy for 2018 and 2020, and re-registering in time for the real election. If you already know of candidates who have demonstrated both risky integrity and sound judgment in matters domestic and geo-strategic, do tell! And vote for him. I don’t know any, so I’ll pass. Currently, as a Stasi target, my social circle inside the US is nil, which is fine with me, but it ensures I don’t personally get to know, or reacquaint myself with, many native born, fully indoctrinated, trustworthy American citizens. And I certainly would not trust anything they’d vote for. (In the US, I’m a COINTELPRO Stalkee; at home in Brazil, I’m a CIA/USAF/PrivateEntity Stalkee. So I don’t personally know Americans I can trust anymore. It’s kind of amusing; the Stasi is isolating me from people I don’t want anything to do with anyway. So it goes…;)

Back to the subject!

Within authoritarian dictatorships, despots know they have no legitimacy; they have to spend time cultivating its appearance. In the US’ prettily packaged totalitarian police state, politicians do not spend two seconds worrying about legitimacy, and they don’t even pay lip service to quaint notions of freedom of speech, association, and the freedom not to be stalked and attacked just for being black, or for simply criticizing the Stasi/MIC and its supporters. They do whatever they want — or whatever Israel, GS, and the Stasi tell them to want — using that ‘I was elected’ excuse. Many readers of TI will apologize for this, saying, that’s what democracy is. But if one observes and compares the behavior of unelected military dictators with US politicians for long enough, one reasonably concludes many D/R/I politicians in the US are some of the nastiest people on the planet, and she may also conclude the US voter is a self-destructive idiot — a person who has already stamped his/her approval of the manufacturing base give-away and the Vietnam / Iraq / Afghanistan disasters, to name just a few. And still, the pedal is to the metal. Voters who elected the fuck-wits bent on installing offensive missiles and forward bases in the former Warsaw Pact countries, and even in the birthplace of Russian culture, are again begging for trouble. They’ll get it too. (The ‘we are being invited’ excuse is 100% BS; corrupt pols in Kiev and Warsaw are no wiser than the fools in D.C.) Ok, that’s getting off topic, but I want to again point out that November votes are encouraging unrestrained, legitimized stupidity in US despots’ brains, and regardless of any proclaimed naivety or good intentions, a majority of Democratic, Republican, and Independent pols & voters are on board with the stupid plan to provoke Russia.

I speculate that if the next batch of politicians won an election with a turnout of < 1% of the voting age population, they would enjoy no legitimacy and they would know it. They would be lame ducks on inauguration day, and they would know many of their ex supporters will be busy studying and discussing options for the next elections. (It is important they not be allowed to join and sod the conversation, as betrayal's price — a cheap, discounted price compared to the sort of penalty paid by, say, a certain Sr. Ceau?escu and the Missus.) And of course, the last, but unendorsed, batch of pols will screw up, just like this batch and the batch before. How could that be worse than the current situation, where politicians are constantly invited by voters themselves to continue grazing on what's left?

There's nothing pathetic about your plan; I'm no one to dismiss it, and I'm interested. The reason I stopped voting against the lesser evil is because it is not a lesser evil, and US pols' loud public spats are bounded by that ever so teeny, tiny, narrow US political spectrum — perceived to be a million miles wide by those who get their 'news' from the NYT or WaPo. Ok, done echoing you ;) I look forward to more correspondence with an ally(?!), subject to your approval and tolerance of my spittle. Just a second… God Damnit! I told you surveillance role playin' cockroaches to leave me alone! God Damnit! Now, where was I…

Thanks, Stan. I’m just voting against the war mongers and for_______ if that’s what it takes…. most probably I will vote Green, and hope that others join in and make it enough to screw up the Democratic party which gets nothing but contempt from me after their support for Israeli crimes and the lack of a spine when it came to going after the previous crop of war criminals etc. A party so devoid of a soul and morally compromised that they cannot even beat the pig-ignorant racist morons on the other side more than about half the time. Not voting sends a message as well. I just think a vote against something is more powerful… purely from a math point of view, of course : )

Well my first reply was cut so I must conclude the nsa can monitor every one of these comments befoe they are even sent. But my previous comment was that the boring yawn person must be one of nsa’s own put out there to disenchant and disinform people who take an interest in theier futures as farm animals

Well played indeed. I knew I smelled the stench of a rancid ghost of one who revels in the cesspools of their victims blood for eternity. Behold the masquerade of a pathetic evil slime on the face of the human condition while it wrestles in it’s last throws of self denial of it’s own vector into the sublime darkness of eternal damnation. Benito Musollini..the mass murderer of 300,000 human beings, has a follower HERE, who revels in the filth of true torture and murder while pretending to uphold some psychotic view that he has chance at resurrecting that which humanity has rejected with every cell of it’s history. Benito Mussolini was a murdering war criminal. PERIOD Get a grip. This pathetic scumbag thinks he can manifest his views upon a historical skeleton whom younger audiences may think is a path to political solutions of biblical significance. In reality, he is no better than the bacteria laden scum on the inside of your garbage can.

Chris Jones wants everyone to see him patting his open mouth in a big stage yawn. Quick, everyone notice how world-weary and grown-up he is. Chris does not care about this non-story, and it’s vital everyone see how he didn’t care. He really cares that you perceive him, Chris Jones, a total stranger, so savvy and realistic that he knows each story before it breaks. He does not care. Please note this in your file.

Speaking as a card carrying liberal Chris, this isn’t a joke. Look at what the Obama administration did using the IRS against its political enemies. Do you want to live in a country where you disagree with the president and have tools like this turned against you? We simply do not have the ability to use tools like this responsibly enough to safeguard our own liberty. Oh and this is one more thing coming out that in my mind makes Snowden a patriot, not a criminal.

I know, right? Why shouldn’t law enforcement have the ability to perjure their way through criminal trials about the sources of their evidence with complete impunity?
How could justice be otherwise served?

The important part of this story is not that surveillance data is searchable. The important part is that it is searchable for purposes other than national security. Thus, it undermines a key principle of law “fruit of the forbidden tree”, in which evidence gathered though illicit means are not admissible in court. This principle was created to prevent the cavalier and unchecked abuse of individual privacy by the State, and is necessary to protect the 4th Amendment.

Again, it is not the search tool itself that is the problem. The problem is the broad access.
The broad access to this search tool is dangerous not merely because it makes possible “parallel construction” and violation of fundamental legal principles, or because it turns law enforcement and prosecutors into liars and perjurers before a judge and jury, but also because it creates opportunities for untraceable unprovable abuse such as framing/setups, discrediting activists/witnesses/journalists/opposition/politicians, blackmail, extortion, and even data mining to find random and incidental correlations that can be used to prosecute the innocent. The possibilities are boundless.

The broad access to this search tool, with no transparency as to the nature or extent of its oversight, deeply undermines the Rule of Law. That is what this story is about.

What would happen if this “soft” evidence was made available to the public in order to entrap the individual further? Or what if the public were constricted into joining into entrapment of targeted individuals? They could certainly be made to look evil with the right kind of email, phone calls, website visits, etc. There’s nothing to stop this from happening with this kind of database. It could take on a life of vicious gossip that could ruin the target’s life. I wonder if there is any evidence of this going on with evidence from the database?

Exactly. Add slander, defamation, racial profiling, the de facto of Posse Comitatus Act which potentially can endanger the lives of innocent people. Michael German mentioned in Democracy Now, how people in biometrics databases are literally unemployable W/O their knowledge. How can individuals sue an insidious apparatus for defamation & slander? No redress whatsoever.

I hope I have understood the peverse system. They sold surveillance technic to goverments, take back (meta) data and sold them?
It’s a little bit like the FED-Dollar (take gold for one – for worthless paper / Bretton Woods), here it`s “human/private”-Dollar (kickstart 9/11 ?). Disgusting

Metadata reveals information about a communication—such as the “to” and “from” parts of an email, and the time and date it was sent, or the phone numbers someone called and when they called—but not the content of the message or audio of the call.

The word metadata is exactly like the word terrorism. It is a purposefully undefined word used to excuse bad acts by the government.

Now, I’m trying to come up with an actual definition of metadata in which the statement quoted above is true, while even somewhat resembling the reality of the situation, and I got nothing.

What is the point of repeating the government narrative, but without attribution?

If you don’t understand the tech, then you will be bamboozled by the government.

Terrorism, official US definition: The deliberate targeting of civilians to achieve a political goal.
Terrorism, candid definition: Violence carried out by Muslims who are not working for the US and its allies.
Terrorism, actual definition: A wide range of violence which includes military actions of the US and its allies.

Metadata, official US definition: Depersonalized numbers used to catch terrorists
Metadata, candid definition: Highly revealing data used to populate invasive databases
Metadata, actual definition: Your deeply private secrets, including content, available to the government for all time and for any purpose they decide on.

Here’s another infinite platitude: “Reasonable Suspicion”. It goes from “circumstantial” evidence, to unreliable informants to the use of parallel construction. Blatant usurpation of the 6th Amendment.

Terrorism: any action that endangers profits of the so-called “elites”
Terrorist: anyone who upsets us (intelligence “services”)
Proper terrorists: Bring it on. Let them get on with it. Our business case. Provoke if they start to get all touchy-feely; and create when investment required.

Content of phone calls, emails etc: what you said you were up to.
Metdata: what you were really up to.

Metadata is information that describes data. There are two types: structural metadata, which describes the parameters of acceptable data in a field (how many digits in an SSN, what a US phone number looks like, etc.) Descriptive Metadata describes the primary data involved.

Of course the media is running away with a computer term with one part of the term as the entire definition and obscuring the actual meaning of the word: Metadata is now always illegally gained customer records, just like any mention of the term hacker in the news always describes criminals.

Most people have no idea how much information about their communications is transmitted, collected, and stored in the form of metadata. It is also possible that the government is creating metadata from the information they collect. For example, a computer generated text transcript of an audio call could be considered metadata. The content of a poorly formatted E-mail could also be collected as metadata. In fact, the body of an E-mail message could contain HTML or base64 metadata subject to collection by the government. So we should not assume that the content of our communications is not being collected in some form, if not its entirety.

So? I thimk you fail to realize just how close we are to a system in which the meta-banksters who control almost everything, are to establishing complete control of absolutely EVERYTHING of value Some people predict that the inevitable crash of US is being planned for 2016 or 17. If the likely candidate for president doesn’t do as instructed, the crash will be before the election in 2016. If he/she behaves, the crash will come after. That’s what some people thimk. Others believe that 10 years is the outset before the inevitable crash. If you read the document “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”, you’ll get the complet plan. OH, yes, it doen’st matter if this document were written by a Jewish person or not (which I am), it’s still a valid document of statecraft more crafty than Machiavelli’s Prince. The Jews claim this document is a hoax. Read it and if you can’t tell that that is EXACTLY what has come to pass, then U must b retarded. This document is just too clever to be a hoax.

Great document. it shows one more time how this agency (and similar in other countries) lie all the time to gain more power (I Love these “Search for life pattern” button on these slides….. scary !!!). These leaks are getting more & more interesting, it’s a BOMB.
love how it almost never appear on the front pages of main mainstream newspapers….makes u think

This is so they can find lawbreakers. The next question is, what law? Because once the tracking system is in place the law will be whatever the trackers want. When there is no oversight and no public controls balancing the power, then the law is only what they want it to be.

Tha’s rat! Secret societies, no less secret government organizations have always been dangerous. The Jesuits were so dangerous to the Papacy that they had tobe reigned in. The KGB basically still runs the old USSR (Now what’s left is Russia), that is, top office holders in Russia are former KGB officers. What do you thimk we have in USA? Well, one man who challenged the FED, that is, JFK, was murdered for it, the sleeping president, er, excuse me, the ACTING president–U know the one with alzheimers that let the criminal oliver north run foreign policy? yes, that criminal, or his vice president who had been head of the KGB–er, excuse me again, i mean the CIA who became the next pres? When we take back our government we need to institute a law barring intelligence persons from office–too dangerous like the Jesuits. Then after the KGB president, came the Mena president, and then the SON of the KGB president who REALLY forked thing up. Unfortunately, I supported the present president at first because i thought he would arrest these criminals and do somethingt about the 9/11 criminals. The whole of the 9/11 traitors have not been investigated when all that obvious evidence is to seen everywhere.

Basically my comment was that U should get a copy of “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” which U can find on line easily. This document is so insidious that it Makes Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ look more like the Princess, that is childs play. The Jews (I am one too, so I can say it) claim they did not write this and it is a hoax. Just read it. It reads as if it is a condensed history of the past 300 years. It shows how the politicians, the clergy, the news media and the schools are being controlled and ruined. If U happen to read it, you will notice that it is TOO DAMNED clever to be a hoax.

JFK was murdered because he challenged the FED. A privately owned bank that the US government gets it’s money from when the constitution clearly spells out who has the power to print/coin the money. and WE pay INTEREST on that money that is borrowed from a nonlegitimate organization, ie, the FED. The important question is: Who runs/controlls the FED? Banksters!

So America has the tools now to expose the criminals (the real criminals) of the worst attacks this country has seen but only certain people can see this tax funded information (not even Merkle can see her own files)?

.Only certain few people control this information and they can use it for their own power and manipulation of world events.

This is dangerous.
:
Check out the last 30 seconds of 2, then watch the whole thing:

I’m happy that finally someone leaked information about ICReach and it wasn’t me. I’ve been a developer for a subcontractor (EDAQS) that developed parts of the analysis tools. ICReach is far more complex than what media is broadcasting and not just an NSA search tool. It doesn’t only affect the US but the whole world, with focusing on the US and Europe and sick predictive mathematical algorithms. You can’t imagine what is going on behind the curtain. ICReach is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve witnessed and worked on systems that simulate whole economic systems and shit.

This Government is so despicable! We the People really need to all go to the Million Mask March 11/5 and let them know that this in unacceptable!! They’re supposed to be run by US! Not the other way around!

We could go back and blame BILL HAMILTON for developing the PROMIS software in the first place.

Let’s get this straight : OUR employees of OUR democratic government force their way into the public communication companies. They ravage every available item of OUR data in order to provide US with security.

But they have to develop a secret search engine to access the secret database about us in order to keep us safe. Except we don’t feel safe and they have shredded the constitution in order to accomplish this task. AND they still have their jobs?
You can’t call it fascism because we elect our leaders. We can’t site the actions as illegal because they change the laws and interpret the laws in regards to their needs and actions.
The term “failed democracy” isn’t catchy, but it’s descriptive. As much as we would all like to see Dick and Donald burn, the president assigned his powers over to Dick and Dick used and abused every inch of it. The signing statements, the retro legislation, the outright breach of justice……
If we call it a “failed democracy”,( I’m up for a better descript), at least we would win a little respect from the rest of the world that knows what’s going on and must be wondering WTF we’re doing over here or if we have any idea of how to control OUR government!!

‘By directly pitting the predictions of ideal-type theories against each other within a single statistical model (using a unique data set that includes imperfect but useful measures of the key independent variables for nearly two thousand policy issues), we have been able to produce some striking findings. One is the nearly total failure of “median voter” and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to
have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy..’

You mean ‘Our Republic’, right? Because this country was NOT founded as a democracy and it is spitting in the eye of every Founder to call it one.

As popularly stated, ‘Democracy is Two Wolves and a Sheep Deciding What to Have for Dinner’ and it’s absolutely true. One should not be surprised in a country where the vast majority of its inhabitants can’t even distinguish between a democracy and a republic that shameful accumulations and abuses of power can occur.

‘Democracy is Two Wolves and a Sheep Deciding What to Have for Dinner’

In the US, the sheep get to vote for which wolf has them for dinner.

Sheep run to the slaughterhouse, silent and hopeless, but at least sheep never vote for the butcher who kills them or the people who devour them. More beastly than any beast, more sheepish than any sheep, the voter names his own executioner and chooses his own devourer, and for this precious “right” a revolution was fought.
Octave Mirbeau, Voters’ strike

You CAN call it fascism, because you get a choice of two millionaires to vote for, and nobody else gets a look in. Do you feel safer, knowing that your idiot three letter agencies know I just phoned in an order for cat food?

I would offer that the government of the US hasn’t been anything close to OUR government since Tricky Dicky’s stint in office, maybe even before that (remember JFK fired Allan Dulles for reported insubordination, and then JFK was deposed of). So one can bandy about labels for the what the powers that be allow the masses to delude ourselves we are “doing over here”, but it doesn’t matter a whole lot to them as long as we don’t get too uppity. Should the recognition of our enslavement become too apparent to enough of us that we actually act out, they have the pieces in place to quell any insurrection we might raise. This article just pointed out that they are actually predicting who among the masses are anticipating acting out (the “Minority Report” in today’s reality). The means to quell our disquiet has also been pointed out in Ferguson, by none other than a militarized police force. There is no reason to think that the power elite won’t use such force to maintain the status quo, at their discretion. Das endit es.

One thing coming through clearly is that rendition and torture have been applied to certain individuals identified through metadata analysis as likely terrorists. Another thing coming through clearly is that these law enforcement people have a strong belief in the accuracy, if not infallibility, of the conclusions flowing from analysis of metadata.

For example, we in Canada had a number of our citizens and landed immigrants abducted by the U.S. and shipped to torturers in far off countries. Our police were intimately involved, perhaps even initiating the action. They even had the brass to send questions to the torturers in at least some instances. Whenever questioned regarding the evidence that prompted their confidence that they had actually identified a really bad guy, they played the ‘respect for police’ card, saying that it was all secret and that we’d just have to trust their judgement. Well, it turned out that they had nothing, except bad judgement, and we now have paid out or will pay out huge sums to these poor saps that these cowboys set upon. In light of what we now know thanks to Edward Snowden, it’s a sure bet that they were utilizing their new toy, mass surveillance. (Heady stuff if your a cop, I’m sure.)

Now we find that this establishment of guilt by innuendo approach is being aggressively adopted by domestic law enforcement, as clearly revealed in the above article. ….Which prompts the question, when are our elected representatives going to stand up for the rights of those that elected them? This is no small matter, for it is through them and our courts that we effect our democratic control of government, and thus our freedom?

Well Murray, I’m at a lose for any other avenue to put a stop to mass surveillance and secrecy. There is no other way. The people that occupy the positions referred to have to be pressured to do their job. The fact that we are quite disillusioned with them cannot be allowed to cause us to give up and let it happen. The future freedom of us all hangs in the balance.

People in general, and especially Canadians, are reticent to express opinions that may appear out of order or radical. (The old joke comes to mind. To offend an American, call him unpatriotic; To offend a Canadian, call him a loudmouth and a malcontent.) The citizens of the Five Eyes countries have to be motivated to speak up, and do so loudly and to an extent that it becomes obvious that there is huge public concern. My question is, in an infinitesimally small manner, an effort to motivate pressure on those that have been given our proxies to effect self government in our democracies, and also, an effort to create an atmosphere encouraging of the expression of opinion by others on this issue.

Here in Canada we have had limited reporting in the media and even less editorial on the issue. It appears to have become, to some extent, yesterdays news. Yet I think it obvious that as a Five Eyes country, our Canadian Security Establishment, (CSE), is doing pretty much the same as the NSA and the GCHQ. Notably, there is nothing being done by our elected reps, albeit in part due to our electoral method.

I’m interested in your views on all this. Please comment if you have time.

ICREACH does not appear to have a direct relationship to the large NSA database, previously reported by The Guardian, that stores information on millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Unlike the 215 database, which is accessible to a small number of NSA employees and can be searched only in terrorism-related investigations, ICREACH grants access to a vast pool of data that can be mined by analysts from across the intelligence community for “foreign intelligence”—a vague term that is far broader than counterterrorism.

Ms. Wheeler says of that: “I’m fairly certain that is inaccurate.

As I reported on February 6 (at a time when I technically had been hired by the Intercept but not to “report” for them), the circa January 4, 2008 phone dragnet primary order for the first time revealed that the 215 data had been combined with other data “for the purposes of analytical efficiency.””

The Court understands that for the purposes of analytical efficiency a copy of meta data obtained pursuant to the Court’s Orders in this matter will be stored in the same database with data obtained pursuant to other NSA authorities and data provided to NSA from other sources. Access to such records shall be strictly limited in accordance with the procedures set forth in paragraphs A – G.

Every Obama bin-Golf’n comes back from a golf trip, another NSA’s gonna gitch you suckah story comes out, or some major ‘leak’ by Ed Snowjob. When are people going to learn that all this stuff is nothing but a battered wife approach to silencing dissent?

Business all is busines … had scary what how in enemy public , the peoples ending lives in walls of software … l use Tor and is very slow too is part of firefox … the use is difficult in this software .. because.. is anonimus.. alwys thsi problem be here why ..the RED NOT IS FREE… INTERNET is the problem… not the NSA …need New RED..then can tell what the internet is free

OK, this reminds me of what was going down as the CDS balloon started loosing air. No one cared what they were until they stopped performing. Then we couldn’t figure out what they did, but they did NOT stop the Grinch from coming, that’s for sure. BS insurance for all involved but the originator. So, I feel secure in ferreting out this mess as a multiple billing scam with every department paying telephonies what to say while pocketing the premiums.

Time to put on a Utility Belt, Batmen, or you are gonna go down to some very suey customers; chop, chop.

This is a BEAST that will end up EATING it’s own tail. Why are OUR TAX DOLLARS going to SPY on AMERICANS? All of these programs have NO government over sight. This seems to be an offshoot of the “Fusion Center” stuff thats been implemented in each state. Real scary things that would make J Edgar Hoover smile. (We chase the ‘BOOGIEMAN’ to justify our jobs. The NSA must be PROUD?)

First of all, this is unconstitutional to the extent that the NSA is allowing data about US Citizens who are not under investigation to go to other agencies. When the courts declassified their opinions, they said they admonished the government for not following the proscribed minimization rules.
Secondly, I would like to see more publicly exposed about the instances where this has already been abused.

hear hear! transmitting in the clear to say (and to let the NSA and affiliated agencies and clients hear) great work again, Mr. Gallagher.
thank you and all the people of The Intercept for your fine efforts. please keep it up!

“The NSA planned to use the new system to perform more advanced kinds of surveillance—such as “pattern of life analysis,” which involves monitoring who individuals communicate with….tips from NSA intercepts and a DEA database known as DICE.” Maybe they should all be using this on themselves. From my pattern of life study of all the goons I think it might be prudent for us all to put on our tin-foil hats and our funny goggles and give them a middle finger. My guess is that there is all sorts of abuses in accessing all sorts of databases and lots of sharing information and that knowing them not enough oversight or accountability. I would cluck but my tongue is tired from all the wagging. Man those hairy octopus legs turned out to be pretty ugly in the light.

If you were to ask the NSA/CIA how it is they’d insure a Condoleezza Rice/Chevron board of directors would be prevented from accessing such a system to accomplish a personal motivation to murder, while utilizing government ‘assets’ working renditions (Sabrina DeSousa & ‘friends’) the plain/simple/honest answer would be “We can’t” or “We don’t intend to get caught.” The same would be true if a Dick Cheney decided to hire Gary Berntsen (former CIA station chief, moved on to ‘contracting’) to attempt a hit for pecuniary reasons …

Well, mr/mrs/ms fullstop, with well over two hundred reads at the above links in less than 24 hours, and your single complaint, it would appear your net morals are the loser. Maybe other people are able to appreciate some things you can’t ;)

Then the government would do what they do when someone arbitrarily decides to change a ‘buzz word’, send everybody to a 2 week school to learn the new symbols. Everybody who needs to read a schematic already knows what the drum symbol is so why change it, unless you happen to be in the education racket. The education racket is the only beneficiary of ‘buzz word’ and symbols being changed for no good reason. When my brother went back to school to get a Computer Sciences degree he called me every week end to clarify what his instructor was trying to teach. He called one week end wanting me to explain a ‘recursive’ sub-routine. After much discussion we finally established that a ‘recursive sub-routine was what was previously called a ‘re-entrant sub-routine’, same thing but a need for more education to teach people the new ‘words’.

One more bit of evidence, as if any were needed, that secrecy and government do not mix. Let’s see it all. Let’s get it all out in the open. Citizens must take back their government. It’s obvious that the people who are in charge of this are not fit to be in charge of anything.

If anyone would like to know about the Stasi-like apparatus that’s operating from coast-to-coast in the U.S., please take a look at http://FightGangStalking.com

Ignore the misnomer “gang stalking” which is, in reality, a CoIntelPro-style operation being run by the feds. It needs to be exposed and stopped. (Some good, decent, law-abiding folks are being targeted.)

Thank you Ryan Gallagher for your excellent work. (Thanks, as well, to everyone involved with “The Intercept” and First Look Media. Keep it coming until it all unravels.)

Thanks to the brave efforts of an anonymous group known only as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI a sustained political campaign known as COINTELPRO/Counter Intelligence Program came to light in the 1970s. The FBI’s stated goal was “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” groups that they targeted.

Then and now.

And, yes, EC, if only the names of most victims could be released without compromising legitimate investigations.

Would love it if there was an ongoing documentary series on these revelations. They just get more and more chilling. At this rate, in the next 5-6 years, we’ll probably get some big reveal about how the NSA has implanted a chip behind your eye socket at birth.

Sharing of data between various government agencies is an exercise in synergy. If the government knows everything you do, it can save you from making bad decisions. It seems de Tocqueville had some misgivings about this, but he had an irrational fear of despotism.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
de Tocqueville

However, things have changed since de Toqueville’s day. It is evident from the events in Ferguson that the government no longer feels the need to maintain a mask of benevolence. In other words, democracy has just about run its course. The system has secured itself against outside incursions and so the opinion of the people is no longer a significant concern.

So the government should stop pussyfooting around and announce the following changes. Instead of relying on ‘incidental’ and ‘inadvertent’ collection of data to fill their databases, they should simply announce that everything will be merged into a single giant database with no restrictions on what can be collected. Then instead of imitating a ‘Google interface’, hire Google itself to maintain and provide the tools for searching the data. Third, dispense with the court system, as the determination of guilt or innocence can be made objectively by computerized data processing algorithms (although having a judge rubber stamp the decision would be a nice way to retain a human touch). Government needs to be modernized; the sooner, the better.

While Google may have received startup funding from the venture capital arm of the CIA, that doesn’t prove they created the interface for ICReach. The slide says ‘Google-like search'; this suggests a cheap knockoff, otherwise they would have proudly trumpeted ‘Google-designed interface’. If someone shows me their ‘Rolex-like’ watch, I generally assume it is not a real Rolex.

I suspect ICReach doesn’t have an auto-suggestion feature, interactive doodles or other bells and whistles; although for those who have actually used it, please don’t hesitate to correct me. The ‘Pattern of Life’ and ‘Targeting Scorecards’ do seem like nice features.

“Parallel construction” causes militarized police to become self-secret false informants. Does data supplied from Fusion Center computers come from or go to ICREACH data? Are these systems connected for local law enforcement special operations?

At this point, it seems there is or has been virtually no limits to what the NSA surveilled. The public perception of NSA surveillance is divided into two groups: one who think its is necessary for ‘national security’ and the other who think this is clear overreach.

One group thinks Snowden is a hero; another thinks he’s a traitor.

The security state overreach is creeping and is mostly unseen which is why so few find it to be objectionable.

When terrorism takes place, such as the murder of James Foley, the likes of NSA probably get a boost.

When innocent young men get killed in small towns with militarized police forces, some people wake up.

And when people wake up, Obama too pretends to wake up.

But people move on soon enough and forget distant event. And the security state keeps growing all the time. Stealthily.

It’s up to the people to decide what they want to live with in terms of government overreach for the sake of ‘safety’ and security.

The word “stealthily”, just does not fit anymore. This is out in the open now and I have to say for all the EXCELLENT reporting, these guys may be ducking some punches, but they haven’t slow down a bit. Isn’t it great how all debates come down to 50/50. Congress 50/50 Elections 50/50. Plus or minus minimal %. Funny tabulations

There appears to be a functional problem with the Add Comment radio button.
Intercept IT you will need to intervene immediately and perhaps someone could advise users that this function is temporarily unavailable.

This is only half of the story. Each and every person in the US has a three-dimensional profile that is tied to much more information than is give here. Your Banking, Utilities, Education, Club membership, Trade Organizations, Political views,
Your Medical History, Proscriptions, Insurance coverage, and a Psychological profile …Basically a full scale mockup of you in 3D . Your thoughts your habits the places you go and how long you stay. Even if you have never used the internet or phone because every record about you that is transmitted over the internet is collected starting from well before your birth. It is an extension of the artificial you known as your corporate fiction in the all capital lettering of ( YOUR NAME) on very official document after the recording of a birth certificate in the all cap spelling of your name. A Government created corporate fiction just to screw you.

Get real. They do NOT have access to our thoughts, or our private, intimate moments for that matter. But just for the sake of argument lets say they did have access to our thoughts. So what? Imagine the poor shlub at the NSA whose job it is to sit at a computer every day, monitoring and recording all of our boorish, pointless, paranoid thoughts. I’m guessing the value placed on such a treasure trove of metadata would be right around zero.

Greaaat reporting! We need to know these facts to maintain our Republic. If only the fools in Intel understood this concept.
Role playing should be used. The most fervent NSA should be made a victim so that such assets can be understood.
Branding a cowboy is the only way to make the cowboy sensitive to a calf’s branding. Three months of being driven from the eagle’s
nest to rendition to the street should cause someappreciation.

NSA lied to congress, what makes you think they aren’t lying about what Snowden took. All they knew before it was reported that he left breadcrumbs for them to determine what documents he took, was that he had touched on 1.5 million documents. Now they are saying only 200,000 tier 1 and 2 documents released to the press, but somehow there are 1.5 million tier 3 documents still out there. Sounds more like the NSA is throwing 1.5 million pieces of mud at Snowden and seeing what sticks. They might also be leaking some documents themselves and blaming Snowden for those leaks.

“” When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.”

Yes… “look what you made me do” and “I’ve got you now, you fucker”… I am paraphrasing : ) My Mother got a lot of good information from that book and shared it with us as children. Very insightful stuff.

“We (Think) We Now Know A Lot More About Edward Snowden’s Epic Heist — And It’s Troubling That We Think This.

Just re-read the article. It’s troubling that reporters get away with this type of conjectural reporting. If there are facts or evidence supported by credible sources, then fine. Otherwise…anyone can throw stuff at the wall just to see if it sticks.

The article is all about “investigative” journalism. We know that he stole highly sensitive information simply by what Grweenwald reported:

“…….Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden possesses dangerous information which could potentially lead to America’s “worst nightmare” if it is revealed, according to the journalist who first published Snowden’s leaked documents.

“Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States,” Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist responsible for publishing some of Snowden’s first leaks, told Argentina-based newspaper La Nación……”

Thus Greenwald supports the contention of the article which is that Snowden stole more than just documents related to civil liberties. The article simply points out that that the location of that information is unknown – and the article points out that who might have access to the information is unknown as well. Snowden has said that no one has received those documents, but there is no proof of that either.

It would appear that the 3rd party doctrine has reached a 2 & 3/5th’s party compromise. This would be unbelievable if the very proof wasn’t made available for all to see. Another excellent bit of work from The Intercept.

But Obama was not ignorant of why JFK had to be killed. He must’ve known when he was fighting for the nomination that the government is corrupt, and that his life would be in danger if his nose got too close to the truth. He must’ve known that if he gets the generals mad he’d pay with his life. So, knowing all this he got into the fight and won; likely knowing that we would have to drop all his populist positions and enter in the system, quiet down and keep his mouth shut. I blame Obama. He got in and then got scared. He’s your basic coward.

My take on Obama is that he was always corrupt and his “I’ll be a do-right president, just don’t pay no mind to those racists out there.” schtick, *that was the wool that wound up pulled thick over his supporters’ eyes. The Power Elite would never have put him forward as a candidate if they had one single iddy biddy doubt as to where his allegiances were/are anchored.

No one, no single person gets to run for high office until and unless they’ve passed strenuous testing administered by the CIA. More likely than not, Obama was being groomed for the job he’s now doing since before that stretch of disappeared time at Columbia.

The error in your response goes far beyond formatting seer. It’s another conspiratorial theory on top of the one promoted by Josephine. Of course, Bobby had to be killed for the same reason – and John Lenin (Michael Brown?).

It may be a bit far-fetched to suggest but since we are into conspiracy theory here I wonder if Obama is subject to some form of blackmail, and has been since 2008. It could be the explanation of why he reversed himself immediately after getting into the White House. He promptly re-appointed several of the Bush era senior people, and so on. he has basically turned his back on those that so ardently supported him.

Another confirmation Summers! Yes, Tom is onto something big but just hasn’t quite got the whole picture yet. He’ll be along shortly though, and you’ll be crying “conspiracy theory” all the way down the long road to Reality.

His campaign rhetoric is an essential part of getting into the Whitehouse/Whorehouse. It’s required by his controllers as he represents them, and they do not tolerate allowing just anyone to serve them. The president-to-be is cultivated over time. And the current president began his duties to his controllers long before his landmark speech to the Democrat Convention in which he was introduced to the public in the full regalia of his LIBERAL™ colors.